I’ve been trying to limit myself to downloading one Dylan concert per day. Most days (but not today) I fail utterly to stay within those confines. If you know where to turn, you can find recordings of hundreds (thousands?) of his shows, and while the recording and performance qualities vary, I’ve been amazed at just how often he totally reconfigures his classic material. Earlier in the week, I was listening to a few wildly different versions of “Tangled Up In Blue.” They were all performed within just a few years of each other, but so different were the arrangements that it hardly sounded like the same performer.

[I’d direct you to links of these performances, but Dylan’s Web Sheriff does a pretty good job scouring the ‘net. Also, to be truthful, Dylan shows can be pretty spotty—some nights, he’s on fire; other nights the fire is reduced to a wheeze.]

Among recording artists, Dylan stands virtually alone in his willingness to re-interpret his material. Although I’m also a big Beatles fan, I can think of only one instance where Paul McCartney radically re-imagined one of his chestnuts for live performance.

For years, I envied visual artists. They have the license to visit and revisit the same rough material again and again. Think, for example, of Josef Albers (here, and here, and here) or Piet Mondrian (here, and here, and here), or the early American paintings of Edward Hicks (here, and here, and here). Even Leonardo da Vinci had at least a couple of goes at his “Virgin of the Rocks” material.

By circling and counter-circling around the same material—reconfiguring it slightly but essentially staying within the same structural limits—these artists are forced to search for different aspects and qualities to emphasize. Subtle differences become hugely important. If anything, they learn to better understand the conflicts and conundrums that their material poses.

Viewing such works together can also be fulfilling. I used to spend a lot of time in the Rothko Room at DC’s Phillips Collection, staring at what some might say were different versions of the same painting. Each time I’d go, I’d find myself absorbing different qualities of the paintings—one day, their mistiness; on another day, it would be the solidity of their color.

Look at those Albers paintings again. The structure is the same. The style and application of color is the same. But, if you’re like me, you leave those paintings with wildly different impressions.

I keep wondering if such a thing might be possible within a short story collection. What would it be like to read, say, eight variations of the same scenario? What would it be like to write those eight variations? To be clear, I’m not talking about assembling a linked story collection where one story builds upon a previous story, and so forth. Instead, each story would start at the same place, and end at approximately the same place. The characters and settings would be the same, but whereas one story might emphasize, say, the father character, another story might emphasize the mistress. Or the child. The outcomes might be different, which would necessarily impart different meanings, but none of the stories would reach outside set parameters to obtain that outcome.

Or would this work better as an anthology? Would writers of fairly well-known stories be willing to go back to them and create a second story? Like a Dylan show, the results might be spotty—the high-wire aspect would be part of the challenge.

One often hears writers say that, after they’ve built their structure and prepared a cast of characters that act in certain fashions, the results of their stories are inevitable. I’m not sure this is necessarily true. Just as in life, when minute changes are introduced, wildly different outcomes can result. The fun would be discovering what those minute changes might be— and discovering what will necessarily remain unchanged.

As you might have gathered from reading pastposts, I’m something of a Philip Roth fan. I’ve read a dozen or so of his novels but, given his long and productive career, that barely touches the surface. What I like about Roth is that he does not shirk from taking on “big” subjects. Yes, at times I cringe at his characters’ misogyny, but there’s such energy to his prose—which is strange, because his digression-filled narratives so often cut back and forth in time, a strategy that in less-gifted hands is momentum-killing.

James Wood, writing about 2007’s Exit Ghost, called Roth “the great stealth postmodernist of American letters,” which is fitting. We don’t often lump Roth in the post-modern camp because, on a sentence level, he does not consciously seek to dazzle. His first book, the National Book Award-winning story collection Goodbye Columbus, was published three years before Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He comes from that last generation before Barthelme and Pynchon.

As Wood says,

“Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this ‘without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,’ as [Roth’s character, Nathan] Zuckerman approvingly says of [another writer’s] work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that [his characters] are just ‘invented characters.’

[Implicit in Wood’s assessment is idea that razzle-dazzle sentences and “magic-realist gimmickry” necessarily lead to the creation of characters that readers do not perceive as being “real.”]

While Roth’s sentences don’t call attention to themselves, I have long admired him for his paragraphs. Especially when detailing past incidents, he can crunch so much into his paragraphs. Multiple speakers. Multiple lines of dialogue. Multiple actions. Yet always there is enough of a connecting narrative thread to pull the reader along.

I was reminded of Roth’s paragraphs again when reading Portnoy’s Complaint last week for the first time. To be honest, the novel as a whole disappointed me, but some of the paragraphs floored me.

Here’s one in which the young Alexander Portnoy recalls his father arguing with his mother while leaving his house one morning to go to work:

“Talk?” he cries. “It’s the truth,” and in the very next instant is thomping angrily around the house hollering, “My hat, I’m late, where’s my hat? who saw my hat?” and my mother comes into the kitchen and gives me her patient, eternal all-knowing sphinx-look… and waits… and soon he is back in the hallway, apoplectic and moaning, practically in grief, “Where is my hat? Where is that hat!” until softly, from the depths of her omniscient soul, she answers him, “Dummy, it’s on your head.” Momentarily his eyes seem to empty of all signs of human experience and understanding; he stands there, a blank, a thing, a body full of [excrement] and no more. Then consciousness returns—yes, he will have to go out into the world after all, for his hat has been found, on his head of all places. “Oh, yeah,” he says, reaching up in wonderment—and then out of the house and into the [car], and [he] is gone until dark.”

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a new novel, which I hope to finish by sometime in September. In it, I’ve been trying to write Roth-like paragraphs incorporating the multiple speakers and multiple acts. This is something of a stretch for me, but it’s going well and I’m having a lot of fun writing it.

Falco Errata: Recently, I wrote about Ed Falco’s Burning Man collection. I neglected to mention that he’s also the man responsible for the forthcoming Godfather sequel. Here’s an interview he gave to The Roanoke Times last month about that project.

Blackwell Errata: Check out Gabriel Blackwell’s hypertext-y “Neverland,” now up at Uncanny Valley. It’s a really fun piece, so be prepared to spend some time there. Or, better yet, make multiple visits.

Last week, I got an email* from Lenny Dykstra hitting me up for money. As detailed in The New York Times (and elsewhere), the one-time baseball star turned financial guru is bankrupt. He’s being held in jail on multiple felony charges. In 2009-2010, I carried on an email correspondence with him. We are not what you might call “tight,” yet he wanted to know if I could spare $1,000-2,000 to help him make bail.

I’m a lifelong New York Mets fan. Outside of Tug McGraw, the screwball-throwing reliever who was the heart and soul of the Ya Gotta Believe ’73 team, Lenny is my favorite all-time Met. On an ’86 team loaded with stars (Strawberry, Gooden, Carter, Hernandez, Darling), it was his scrappy play and clutch post-season hitting that was instrumental in winning the World Series. And yes, in typical Mets fashion, they traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies.

When it came to sizing up ballplayers and game strategy, Lenny was brilliant. Off the diamond however, maybe not so much. I still remember how he tried to pick up vee-jay Martha Quinn when being interviewed on MTV. He lived life recklessly, famously wrecking a Mercedes in a drunk driving accident after John Kruk’s 1991 bachelor party—in the process nearly killing himself and catcher Darren Daulton. He turned State’s witness in a case against a Mississippi gambling emporium, but his Atlantic City gambling escapades were legendary. Rumors of recreational and performance-enhancing drug use dogged him throughout his career. After Phillies’ losses, he sulked alone at bars.

Like many people, I assumed he was a “dumb jock” (an unfortunate stereotype), so I was shocked to learn in a March 2008 New Yorker article that he had made it big in the business and financial worlds. He had opened a chain of high-end car washes in California, which he leveraged into a fortune that was ultimately pegged at $58 million.

Sixteen months later, in July 2009, Lenny filed for bankruptcy. His petition for bankruptcy protection indicated he was $50 million in debt. The guy was supposed to be a financial genius—but do the math: could one guy really blow through $100 million so fast?

A July 9 2009 CNBC interview was even more shocking: for eighteen minutes, he rambled and mumbled—at times coherently, other times not. To my untrained eye, he appeared to be under the influence. Though he readily acknowledged agreeing to the very dubious financial arrangement that led to his bankruptcy, he appeared to believe himself a victim of some vast conspiracy to rid Lenny of his wealth.

Okay. So being the putz that I am, I sent Lenny an email advising him to seek help. Therapeutic help. I told him about an alcoholic family member whose life became “so much calmer, better, after he tried going sober.”

At the end of the email I wrote,

“If you're still reading this, you're probably thinking, [screw] this guy named Kocz. But I sincerely wish you the best.”

Much to my surprise, he wrote back a nice email thanking me for my concern.

Lenny’s life fell apart during 2009. His wife divorced him. He was forced to vacate his residence. Car dealerships repo’d his rides. Player’s Club, the magazine he was launching, went under—which was a shame, because it featured some of the very best photographic printing I’ve ever seen in a magazine. Friends and family disowned him. Suing Lenny became a cottage industry, as did writing about his troubles.

I became obsessed with Lenny Dykstra. No, I didn’t stalk him, but I read everything I could find about him. I read hundreds if not thousands of newspaper, magazine, and internet articles about him. And I’ve read hundreds if not thousands of pages of legal filings related to the lawsuits that, like fleas to an old mutt, leap up wherever he goes. I tracked down old friends of his to ask their recollections. And beat baseball reporters.

And I contacted Lenny again.

You would think that a gregarious jock would have had lots of friends in high school, but Lenny was baseball obsessed, to the point where he’d practice for six hours each day. The story goes that he only had one friend in high school—and that was because he needed someone to play catch with.

[Lenny later hooked that friend up with a job in one of his car washes—and when he caught that friend stealing from him, he fired him.]

I once asked Lenny, via email, if the story about having only one friend was true.

In typical jock fashion, he wrote back, “YES, AND I STILL HAVE ONLY ONE FRIEND - MY RIGHT HAND.”

Who but Lenny emails in boldface CAPS?

My response was equally crude: “I thought you were left-handed ;)”

I got to admit, it was pretty cool emailing cracks and whatnot with Lenny. He’s one of those over-sized glammed up and game Americans I wrote about last week whose life seems too fantastical to be real. In 1983, the Lynchburg Mets (then the New York Mets’ A-level minor league farm team) played an exhibition game in Shea Stadium. Lenny hits a homerun his first time at bat. Can you imagine? He’s in the low minor leagues, far removed from big league attention, yet his very first at bat in the ballpark where he would become famous is a dinger! Is that uncanny or what?

As a fiction writer, I struggled philosophically with how to come to grips with a phenomenon such as Lenny Dykstra. When one begins writing fiction, one is inevitably cautioned against creating over-sized characters for fear that readers will find them too fantastic to be believed. Imagine writing about that Shea homerun. Would it seem schmaltzy? sentimental? Would readers believe it?

More than anything else, I think this fear of not being believed is why so much contemporary literary fiction is “small.” “Small” as in featuring more under-sized characters than over-sized Dudes.

Last year I started writing about Lenny, creating a (very) thinly veiled roman à clef centered around the Lenny-like character’s purchase of an over-sized mansion that would be his undoing. At the time, I was in-between projects. An agent had agreed to represent another novel I had written and, while I waited for her suggestions on revisions for that novel, I wrote about 12,000 words of Lenny. And I swear, that work was really fun. Then my agent got back to me about the previous novel, and I abandoned Lenny to work on three successive rounds of revisions.

It wasn’t just the revisions that got in the way of the Lenny project. I struggled with how far to stray from real events. More problematic was how I should portray the Lenny-like character—if you believe even a tenth of what’s written on the internet about Lenny, you begin to understand that he might have some very unsavory moral and ethical issues. Could I risk creating a more sympathetic character than the real-life Lenny might be?

Until I got that email last week hitting me up for money, I hadn’t heard from Lenny in thirteen months. Last year, his emails were boastful. He told me how he was going to “shock the house” and prevail in his many legal battles. He would be on top again, “... so just remember: NAILS NEVER FAILS!”

(Again: what’s with the boldface caps? and the itals?)

The tone in last week’s email* was, uh, more subdued. If he were to be released on bail while awaiting trial, he’d likely have to wear an ankle monitor. He’d be confined to a substance-abuse rehabilitation center to receive treatment for unspecified issues. It would be a better place for him, the email said.

It’s hard to believe it takes some people so long to hit bottom, isn’t it?

No, I haven’t responded to the email. If you believe even a tenth of what you read on the internet about Lenny, he used to bet a couple thousand dollars each time he’d go golfing with teammates—and keep in mind, he was a notoriously poor golfer. Right now, raising three children, things are a bit tight for us. A couple of thousand dollars would pay for a month’s rent, insurance, food, and gas money—well, maybe not the gas given how prices keep going up and up.

The email prompted me to look again at what I wrote about Lenny, and I was surprised to see much of it was very good. I sent a chunk off to one journal hoping they might run it as a story. Who knows?

The first novel (which has nothing to do with Lenny) is now on submission with various editors. Yesterday, I emailed the first 55 pages of a new project to my agent. My goal is to finish a draft of this new novel by early/mid-September. Maybe then, after this new project is done, I’ll go back to the Lenny novel. For what it’s worth, here’s how it began:

He has trouble sitting in place for longer than ten minutes. Two hours in a movie theater is an excruciatingly painful experience, no matter how funny the movie. No amount of popcorn, heavily buttered, can lighten his mood. Because of his incredible caffeine intake—most days, he drinks six or more liters of Coca-Cola—he is forever running off to go to the bathroom.

When he speaks, thoughts collide.

He will start off talking about his stock winnings for the day, for he is a day trader who monitors the market closely. The slightest uptick will cause him to spasm at his keyboard. Yet in conversation he can not for long maintain his focus. He will quote Warren Buffet, the Omaha investor justly noted for his financial wisdom (“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”), which will cause him to reminisce about baseball or the pepperoni pizza and cheese fries that he devoured for lunch. At a certain point he will inevitably remember that he is twenty minutes late for a very important meeting (and make no mistake: all his meetings are very important). If a laptop is handy, he will stream videos of himself for visitors while simultaneously toggling to check his email account.

His credit card-sized RAZR, on which he receives personal calls, will ring. Though he employs a variety of ringtones—most drawn from 1980s pop songs—to identify the callers, he will nonetheless inspect his RAZR to further assess the caller’s identification. And then, without answering it, will slip his RAZR back into his pocket and say, “Wow, I can’t believe that loser’s still calling me.”

Slight in frame but pudgier now, he no longer resembles a man with an athletic past. He slouches and, from certain angles, can be mistaken for a hunchback. No razor or—from the looks of his unkempt hair—shampoo has touched him for maybe five days. Most times, his speech is hard to discern, for he speaks quietly and often in a mumble. When he was younger, he had a speech impediment. A lisp. Kids would laugh at him because of this lisp. He could not shake that lisp. Kids called him names because of his lisp—they were not the sort of names that an adolescent boy with heterosexual inclinations would want to be called. When teachers called on him to answer questions in class, he spoke quietly so as to not call attention to his lisp. Garbling his words became another way to mask his speech impediment. That lisp is gone now, but the garble remains.

He will pop open another Coca-Cola, guzzle it. Then he will excuse himself to go to the can, and when he returns moments later, will appear more jittery than before. His head will bob as if to the beat of a song that only he can hear. His right eyelid suffers from an involuntary twitch, such that it appears he is winking at you for no discernible reason.

It’s not that bad. I ought to switch it to past tense though—250+ pages of present-tense might be a little too much. Or maybe I should just put everything in BOLDFACE CAPS, huh?

*Actually, the email was sent by “Dorothy Van Kalsbeek for Lenny Dykstra” (Van Kalsbeek is Lenny’s longtime personal assistant and book keeper), but it came from Lenny’s personal email address. I guess Lenny couldn’t send it personally, with, what, being on lock-down and all.

“[T]he American writer… has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

Philip Roth wrote that assessment over 50 years ago, yet the same holds true today: truth is stranger than fiction.

“Writing American Fiction,” Roth’s essay from which these words were taken, began with a three-page recounting of a Chicago murder and its truly bizarre aftermath. Two girls go missing one winter after seeing an Elvis Presley movie. The case has the city on edge. When the warming weather melts the snowy cityscape, the girls’ bodies are found, naked, in a ditch. A ne’er-do-well drifter confesses to the killings after having shacked up with them for a few weeks. Or so he says. Nuns tell reporters that the victims “were not exceptional girls… they had no hobbies.” Out on bail, the confessed killer holds a press conference to profess innocence. He claims police brutality. The press takes a shine to him. Newspapers run contests, inviting readers to speculate about exactly how the girls were murdered. Still out on bail, the ne’er-do-well drifter develops a lucrative nightclub singing act. He drives around the city in a pink Cadillac. Meanwhile, seeking some small measure of publicity, a kitchen appliance salesman donates a brand new kitchen set to the mother of one of the victims. The mother is ecstatic. “Imagine me in that kitchen!” the mother tells her surviving daughter. All does not go as well for the drifter-turned crooner: he’s extradited to Florida on charges of having raped a 12-year-old there.

The question becomes, how can a writer of fiction make headway when each day’s news brings such lurid and fascinating stories? How can fiction compete with the real when the real can be so glammed up and game?

The Buffalo News recently ran a story about Brian “Spinner” Spencer, who played hockey with the Buffalo Sabres in the 1970s. Buffalo is my hometown, and I have fond memories of going with my father to the old Memorial Auditorium (“The Aud”) and watching Spencer and the Sabres. He was the kind of hockey player a blue-collar town loves: tough, aggressive, and persistent, there was no finesse to the way he wielded a stick. He never scored many goals, but he was always in the corners, fighting for the puck.

Off the ice, he custom-built a truck. Using the gutted chassis of a 2 ½ ton Army convoy transport as its base, he fitted onto it the cockpit of an old DC-3. He was friendly and generous, almost to a fault. Many of the truly great NHL players of the decade—Rick Martin, Darryl Sittler, Dave Keon, and Gerry Hart—maintained life-long friendships with him.

But flash back for a moment to 1970. Spencer has just been called up from the minor leagues to play in a nationally-televised NHL game. His father, Roy, lives in a remote British Columbia town.

“Roy Spencer was thrilled -- until he learned the local CBC affiliate wasn't going to show his son's game. It televised the Vancouver Canucks game instead. Roy Spencer drove 90 miles to the station in Prince George, took hostages at gunpoint and forced it off the air.

“When Roy Spencer emerged from the building, he shot at Mounties deployed outside. They returned fire, killing him in the parking lot.”

As soon as the game is over, officials deliver the bad news.

Can you imagine?

For the rest of his life, Spencer would tell anyone willing to listen that he was going to track down and kill the Mountie that shot his father.

Like Roth’s ne’er-do-well drifter, things did not end well for Spinner.

He retired from the game in 1980 and descended rapidly into substance abuse. He shot through what savings he had. Twice divorced and estranged from his children, he moved to Florida and shacked up with a professional escort. Former teammates tried to rescue him from his downward spiral, offering jobs and support, but he turned his back on them.

In 1987, he was arrested for kidnapping and murdering one of the escort’s johns. The prosecution builds its case largely on circumstantial evidence. The trial ends in an acquittal.

A few months after trial, Spencer’s life is still out-of-control. After bar-hopping all night with a friend, he makes a buy—crack cocaine. Shortly thereafter, he’s approached at gunpoint. It’s a stick-up, but Spencer refuses to co-operate. He’s shot and killed.

In a sidebar, The Buffalo News explored whether the material of Spencer’s life might make for a good movie. Reading this, I was aghast: Must the gold standard for a life be whether it can be successfully adopted for the big screen?

"That would be tricky," Mark Ciardi said of a film about Spencer's life. "I probably would have to keep stating "This is a true story!' over and over again to remind the audience.

"Nothing shocks me anymore, but [Spencer’s life] is a remarkable story. It's almost too crazy for the screen, too unbelievable."

The other day, I wrote about Willem de Kooning’s concept of “soup”—the role of the artist is to dip his or her hand into the “soup” that’s swirling all around us and make Art out of it. In the literary arts, the writer re-shapes and organizes events, creating meaning and impressions that hopefully will linger in the reader’s mind.

The single-best story I’ve read so far this year is the title piece to Ed Falco’s Burning Man (SMU Press), which was long-listed for this year’s prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The story concerns a meeting at the Burning Man festival between a quiet academic/novelist and his brother, “a rock-and-roll bad boy known all over the world as Splay—guitar player, singer, public madman, and pervert from the band of the same name.”

Splay’s the kind of luridly fascinating character we read about almost every day in People, TMZ.com, and newspaper stories culled from the details of police blotter reports. As Philip Roth might have said, “Who could have invented him?”

Yet what makes Falco’s story hum is his mastery of metaphor and image. Too often, attention to image is given short shrift in writing workshops, but Falco’s images are superb. Not only will they give you the creeps (I honestly could not sleep the night after reading this story), but he employs them for a unifying effect, creating meaning through their assemblage and destruction.

I’m tempted to write a little about the specific images, but my children read this blog and, frankly, it’ll mess with their psychological well-being if I do.

So let me quote instead the story’s opening paragraph:

“Burning Man was heat, dust and madness, and I felt about as out of place as it’s possible to feel, in my middle-aged body, in my khaki shorts and knit shirt and sandals, in my expanding belly and soft chest and salt-and-pepper hair cut short, surrounded by the extraordinarily young and youthful with extravagant manes of vibrant hair and muscular, ripe bodies, either mostly undressed or wildly costumed in getups that ranged from Fellini to Mad Max. I’d been at the Labor Day weekend Festival of the Burning Man for two days. I was about to meet my brother, whom I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. I was with a young woman named Chrysalis, no last name, whom I’d met as soon as I arrived at the festival. I pulled up in my Volkswagen camper, parked, and got out to look around at the Black Rock Desert, which is an amazingly flat expanse of crackled mud, and she was standing there, a waif of a girl in fat metallic boots over silvery quilted space-suit pants that came up to her hips and left her hard stomach bare between their Velcro-tab top and the bottom of a bright yellow halter. A massive, framed backpack hovered over her shoulders like a small building. She struggled under the weight of it. I asked if I could be of any assistance, and she shook her head and said no, that she was just about to set up camp. I told her I hadn’t seen her when I pulled up, and I offered to find another spot, but she looked me over and then smiled and said, No, it’d be okay, and we went about setting up our encampments and thus became neighbors.”

Really, it’s masterful. As is the whole story. As the whole collection, which I read a few months ago when I was working on novel revisions. I’ve been meaning to blog about this book for ages, actually.

Many of the stories in the collection directly address what it means to be an artist. I first read “Wild Girls” a few years back when it appeared in The Missouri Review. In that story, two women pick up an artist/teacher for a ménage à trois. (Mind you: I’m typing this as my six-year-old daughter is interrupting me to show me her toy poodle.) One of the women is a former student of the artist.

“He told her, honestly, she had all the talent she needed to succeed as an artist. What he didn’t tell her was how incredibly unlikely it was she’d have the luck and resolve she’d also need, along with the even more unlikely chance she’d have the kind of vision as an artist that was of interest to anyone other than herself. Or that she’d have the kind of character and intelligence that could translate the chaos of experience into something meaningful and resonant, or, even better and more rare, something beautiful. Those were the miracles she’d need. Talent was plentiful.”

Yep. Those words have also kept me awake some nights.

As Lou Reed sang in quite a different context, “It takes a busload of faith to get by.”

Where does art come from? In a 1960 interview, Willem de Kooning said,

"Everything is already in art. Like a big bowl of soup. Everything is in there already, and you stick your hand in and you find something for you."

I came across this quote over the weekend in a Los Angeles Times article and have been thinking about it ever since. The holistic, zen-like tone is striking. It makes art sound easy-peasy*, as if all one has to do is dip your hands in a gallon of house paint, fling it at a canvas, and— voila!—Art results. Which, of course, usually isn’t the case.

Yet I think what de Kooning is saying is that the artist traffics in the same material he or she swims through every day**. You stick a hand into that soup, but rather than just flinging it unadulterated, the artist transforms and shapes that soup into something different. Which ain’t easy-peasy.

De Kooning’s figurative paintings (think of his women, how ferociously teethed they can be) and his late-period canvases with their thick but often cool lines have always amazed me. We lived in the Washington DC metropolitan area for many years and frequently visited both the Hirshhorn, which has an outstanding de Kooning collection, and the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), which boasts some of his finest post-1970 work. And of course we saw the big 1994 retrospective, both in New York and DC. This fall, New York’s MoMA is hosting a new retrospective, which we hope we can see.

On the day Stephen, our first child, was born, I was writing a roman à clef-ish short story based on Willem and Elaine’s last years together. The birth was to be induced, a process that should have taken several hours, so I brought the story along with me to the hospital. While Alison lay on the birthing room bed awaiting her first contraction, I wrote on a small rolling desk that the nursing attendants thoughtfully located for me.

My de Kooning story was one of the first real stories I ever tried to write and it really wasn’t that good.

De Kooning, however, stayed with Stephen.

Especially in his early years, Stephen had an amazing appetite for art galleries. In Washington, most museums either charged no admission or offered ridiculously affordable family membership, making it easy for us to visit and re-visit several museums each weekend.

It wasn’t just de Kooning that held his attention. Warhol isn’t featured prominently in DC public collections, but the BMA’s holdings are excellent. Plus, for about six months, The Corcoran Gallery of Art hosted a huge exhibit of works culled from Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. We’d go almost every Thursday night, when the Corcoran had extended evening hours, and he’d gawk at the electric chairs, skulls, and, strangely, Warhol’s Screen Tests, which were screened continuously.

Because Stephen is on the autistic spectrum and had difficulty reading facial expressions in his early years, we’d go together through the National Gallery’s Old Masters galleries and I’d quiz him on whether the people in the paintings looked happy or sad, angry or befuddled.

In the National Gallery’s East Building, he’d plop himself on the floor and stare at Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy for thirty minutes at a stretch. This would happen on an almost-weekly basis. I never saw someone so captivated by a single painting.

Shortly after we moved to Blacksburg in 2006, I looked at Stephen’s drawings and realized, my god, he drew eyes just as de Kooning drew eyes! And his figures—his lines were like the lines that Warhol employed when outlining his late-period silk-screened portraits!

Okay. I know snarkier readers of this blog are going to sneer— How derivative!-- but, as a parent, I took it as a sign that we were doing something right.

Art museums in Southwest Virginia are few, their holdings not vast. We go to Roanoke’s Taubman Museum of Art at least a couple of times each month, plus take in exhibits at local colleges (Virginia Tech, Radford, Hollins, and Roanoke College), but really, we just aren’t able to expose our children to the same quality and variety of art as we’d like. Absent of constant exposure, the lines of Stephen’s drawings reverted to a childish scrawl; children forget quickly.

We’d been in Blacksburg for ten months when the 4/16 shootings happened. In the wake of the tragedy, I drove back to DC with Stephen and went to the Jasper Johns retrospective (then at the National Gallery). When he becomes intellectually excited, Stephen goes into self-stimulation mode. He’ll flap his hands, shaking them as if he were a wizard casting a spell. Sometimes, his whole body will shake. It’s a classic ASD trait. That afternoon, he stopped at each Johns’ painting and flapped his hands. Still shaken from the shootings, I cried, for it was only then that I realized how long of an absence it had been since he was so engaged with a painting.

*this is one of Stephen’s favorite terms, and yes, this is the first time I’ve typed that term. Would everything be so easy-peasy.

** and yes, this implies that the artist is as much a part of the “soup” as his or her art is.